|
The
poor are still a majority in El Salvador (II)
Some of the principles that since
the beginning shaped the political and the ideological pillars of the party
that presently holds the Executive power express the following: “Freedom is
the base of the human progress” and “the State plays a subsidiary role”.
Such principles have not only shaped the vision and the actions of ARENA
during its three administrations, but they have also distorted its influence
on society. Its vision has been essentially both linear and dogmatic. The
negative consequences of its vision can be reduced to the formula of “let us
do, let us pass”, a typical feature of the economies of an anarchic
Capitalism, that is, the Neoliberal economies. The “commandments” of the
Consensus of Washington, launched in 1990, became the most important aspect
of the economic programs of that party.
Liberalization, privatization, dollarization, regressive taxes, a
fictitiously “stable” macroeconomic situation, quite a few microeconomic
problems, the extreme poverty and the extremely wealthy people, the free
trade agreements... are all distinctive features of the ARENA era. However,
every time someone brings up the subject, the apologists of the official
party insist that their policies are not Neoliberal, but that they are part
of the “social economy of the market”, a democratic economy where everyone
has the same opportunities. It is enough to make an individual effort, to
have “the working spirit of the Salvadoran”, and the necessary eagerness to
help the country. That is why for these apologists, the people who have not
improved their life standards are those who have not tried hard enough.
The freedom ARENA refers to is the exclusive freedom of the powerful sectors
of the country. This idea can be inferred from the evolution of the
country’s economic pulse. Those who have experienced a certain amount of
progress in their economic situation have been those sectors where wealth is
concentrated and becomes a centralized force, that is the financial area and
the sector of services. The contrary has happened with both the agricultural
and the industrial sectors.
According to the 2002 production index, built with the information of the
Central Bank of Reserve, in relative terms, the financial sector and the
sector of services occupied the first couple of places in the economic
growth list. On the contrary, the productive, the agricultural, and the
industrial sectors are now the last names on the list of the sectors that
have improved the country’s economy.
The bet for the sectors of service, either the financial or the commercial
ones, is not based on the benefit that it might bring to the majority of
citizens, the people who are mostly involved with the productive activities
in the agricultural and the industrial sectors. The bet for the sectors of
service is anchored there where it has been more convenient for the
interests of the Salvadoran economic elite.
For instance, the agricultural sector has not received any support from the
government, its products have had a steep fall, its competitiveness is
decreasing, and it does not count with much of a credit line. And even as
deteriorated as both the agricultural and the industrial sectors are, they
still are the highest source of employment for the Salvadorans. The
agricultural and the industrial sector combined held 908,000 jobs in 2002,
according to the Prisma Magazine and thanks to the information provided by
the General Direction of Statistics and Census (DIGESTYC). On the other hand,
the financial sector and the sector of services, which receive the benefits
of the present governmental policies, only hold 253,000 employment positions.
This means that if a government wanted to guarantee the possibility of a
decent job for most of the population, it should abandon the present
priorities and take a look at the productive sectors.
The economic strategies used by ARENA only work for the benefit of the
elite, not for the benefit of most of the population. The results are a few
extremely rich families and an enormous amount of individuals who are
extremely poor. This can be proved by studying the segment of those who are
part of that “economic elite”. The last names that are part of this social
nucleus repeat themselves in both the political and the economic circles
that administrate the country (See the article by Paniagua, C. “El bloque
hegemonico empresarial”, ECA No. 645-646). These nucleus of power are
connected with the government, the members of the official power, the most
important and profitable business companies represented by the ANEP, and
with the leading communication media of the country.
The freedom of El Salvador is, therefore, fictitious. It is more of an
exclusivity of rights strategy, a matter of economic, social and political
benefits that fundamentally favor a closed economic elite, so closed that
you can know them by their names.
The poverty of the Salvadorans: A collateral damage?
The governmental team of President George Bush used the expression
“collateral damage” to refer to the human loss of the last wars organized by
the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paraphrasing that expression, the
collateral damage of the Neoliberal model seems to be alive in El Salvador.
ARENA has played, in fact, a subsidiary role. The problem is that it has
played that role exclusively for the sake of the powerful sectors of the
country. However, it is important to say that, in the context of the
political debate, that party has not even been close to admit their
responsibility for the present social and economic crisis.
The government is using, in his present political campaign, his allegedly
successful plan to reduce the levels of poverty, and this is a terrible
contradiction, especially when the variables that distort the statistic
indicators of poverty are evident.
According to the report called Economic and Social Strategies 2004-2009,
created by FUSADES, “one out of every seven Salvadorans lives abroad, mainly
in the United States”. Does this piece of information have an influence on
the poverty levels of the country? According to FUSADES, “a 20% of the
Salvadoran homes, mostly the homes of poor people, receive remittances, and
this enables to improve the income distribution”. In addition, according to
that investigation, 1.1 million Salvadorans live in the United States, and
together they make an annual income of $13.1 billion, an amount equivalent
to the GNP of El Salvador. Out of that income generated by the Salvadoran
immigrants who live in the United States, the country received a number of
remittances that added up to approximately $2,000 million, which represented
a 14% of the national GNP in 2002. While for 2003, that amount would have
approximately increased by $50 million.
That external source of income is therefore the “lifesaver” of the domestic
economy, but it is also a “deceptive” source of income, because it helps to
hide the actual levels of poverty that the country has. If we add to this
the unreliably weak information about poverty and the tendency to distort
the information that the most important news media enterprises have (because
they belong to the same economic elite) we are actually living an economic
lie.
The Report of Human Development, El Salvador 2003 emphatically indicates
that the methodology to calculate the existing poverty line is a very weak
system, and that it is necessary to reformulate it. It is not acceptable to
say that “the total poverty of the country was reduced from 65% (1992) to
43% (2002)”; The PNUD itself doubts about these percentages. Therefore,
given the present situation, this is the same as saying that we are blind
about the actual dimensions of poverty. This is a serious flaw that helps to
reproduce injustice in this country and it encourages the creation of the
wrong economic policies.
The situation gets even more complicated if we see that poverty is not only
a matter of income. The quality of the life that a person lives and his or
her welfare as a human being are aspects that cannot be contemplated through
the Index of Human development alone. Insecurity, the inadequate conditions
of the environment, the limitations of democracy, the capacity to have an
influence on the matters that affect people, and the decentralization of the
State are all elements that cannot be found in the aforementioned Index.
If we were to measure the poverty level, for instance, in terms of the
average income used by the World’s Bank, we would wonder how true it is to
say that a down town street walker, because she makes a couple of dollars a
day, cannot be considered poor. The irony of the statistics is that, even if
they are useful to portray an idea about the phenomenon of poverty, they
also leave aside a considerable number of important parameters. The same
could be said about all of the people who work either in the urban informal
sector or in the agricultural sector.
In spite of the weak aspects of the formal measurement of the poverty level,
poverty has been traditionally been measured taking the income as a synonym
of happiness (which does not necessarily mean an improvement in the human
welfare). That is how the Salvadoran Neoliberal model is imposed as the
public aspiration of reaching the consumption parameter of countries such as
the United States. However, this is neither desirable nor feasible, because
it imposes a logic that destroys the idea of human development and the
environment. Even in the United States, this kind of actions does not enable
the Americans, who are the leading consumers of the world, to find “happiness”.
According to the World-watch Institute, the country with the highest levels
of consumption is the United States, a place where you can find an
astonishing number of cars and not enough people with a driver’s license.
However, the Americans are not happier because they have more cars.
According to this institute, when an opinion poll was conducted, only one
third of those interviewed said that they were “very happy”. That number is,
according to the statistics, the same of those who thought that were very
happy in 1957, when the levels of wealth in the United States were only half
of what they are now.
All of these aspects crash with the perspective that President Flores has.
During his fourth year anniversary speech, he said that a proof of the
success of his policies about poverty was that “ten years ago, there were
100,000 vehicles circulating in El Salvador. Now, the Salvadoran people have
improved their income and they have access to credits because of the
monetary integration system, there are approximately 500,000 cars
circulating”. The key question here is what does that have to do with the
actual purchasing power of the people, with the sustainable human
development, or even with the public policies? It would be enough to
remember the information provided by the Human Development Index of El
Salvador for 2003, which mentions that “more than half of the reduction of
the rural absolute poverty levels during the last ten years can be explained
because of the increasing number of remittances”. And this is not due to the
right choices of the present economic policies, but because of the negative
consequences of these policies on the human development.
|
